Front Lawn Parable

Before I went on vacation  the Board of Trustees arranged to have our front lawn here at The First Baptist Church in Essex re-seeded. For a few days before I left,  I spent some time, along with some others, including Dick Adams and Jim Ackerman, watering this newly seeded lawn.            

            I’m sure that I’ve shared this story, or part of it with you before, but it fits in nicely here.  One summer at a youth camp run by First Chinese Baptist Church, Senior Pastor James Chuck was speaking at a campfire one evening and was commenting about the frustration campers often feel when they come back home after having a mountain top experience at camp.  He spoke about how he was standing at his kitchen window one morning looking out at his backyard and noticing that it was all brown and seemingly dying.  He began to make a comparison between his backyard and the spiritual lives of the campers.

          “All week long,” he began, “you’ve been here at this camp where every activity in which you’ve been involved has been designed to help you grow closer to God;, to help you get to know Jesus better; to place you in situations where you would better understand what it means to love God and your neighbor as yourself – 24 hours a day for 5 and a half days. People at camp, people at your home church, have been praying for you in some instances even while you slept.   But when you go home, you’ll be involved in a lot of activities and with a lot of people who have no interest whatsoever in any of that. So why wouldn’t you find that frustrating.  He shared some strategies for making their time at home more like the time they had been spending at camp, and  then he went back to speaking about his backyard.  He said, “My yard didn’t die overnight – rather, it got this way through extended periods of neglect.  It’s the same way with our spiritual lives.”

 Our newly installed front yard was installed on the same soil that was there before.  We didn’t bring in any new topsoil.  What happened was that the contractor simply scraped the old surface off, roughed up the loosened soil a little, didn’t even bother the moles who have wreaked havoc with this lawn for (I’m guessing) generations of moles.  After that, the contactor threw down some grass seed, told me how much and how often to water it and drove away.  But when I left here on vacation, we had a pretty good start on a fresh green lawn. There were a few bare spots, some rough places, lots of mole trails, some rocks, and some places where the  new grass seed came in lush and thick. 

All of this makes me think of the parable of the sower.  Our lawn may look pretty good right now – it’s had a lot of loving care, the growth is new, God has blessed us with a fair amount of rain. But.   .   .  . if we have less rain in August, if Dick and Jim and I don’t keep up our schedule of watering, if the moles invite friends over for a picnic of nice fresh grass roots to chew on  (if all of those things happen) .    .    .  my guess is that it won’t be long before we might want to have somebody come and replace the lawn again.

Now, this passage from Matthew 13 gives  us the parable and the meaning.  What I want to do is suggest that the church has a role to play in tending all of these types of soil. 

During my vacation I spent a good amount of time reading an extremely challenging book by a pastor from a church in Santa Cruz, California.  The title of the book is They Like Jesus But Not the Church – Insights from Emerging Generations.  I’m pretty sure it’s the book I’ll recommend for our next book group.  If faith in Christ is to grow in the cultural soil in which these emerging generations are planted, that soil must be tended by patient, sensitive and persistent gardeners.  Too often we go around spouting the word of God to nobody in particular and so the soil falls on the footpath and in the words of the parable,  the birds come and eat it. Now certainly the birds need seed for food – so it is true that God’s word doesn’t go out for nothing, but that was not it’s purpose.  In his book, about those who like Jesus, but not the church, Dan Kimball points out that especially those in emerging generations are waiting for the Word of God to be shared in a relationship with them.  A good gardener has a relationship with the soil.  You can see it under her nails.  You can smell it on the gardener.  You can see the callouses on their knees – and in their relationship with the soil, they can tell if it needs water, they learn if there are roots, rocks or critters troubling the growing area and take appropriate action to prepare soil to receive the seeds.  It is because of their relationship to the soil that the miracle God placed in the seed grows. 

The first type of soil Jesus identifies is the rocky soil.  If you go to new construction sites these days you will find that one of the steps in preparing the site for the pouring of a foundation is a process in which a company sorts the soil that is removed from the foundation and basement areas in order to separate the large boulders,  medium stones, gravel and pebbles and the topsoil from each other.  All these boulders, stones, gravel and pebbles are of value to someone, and the topsoil too. The contractor could probably just smooth over most of these stones, but the sorting of all of this of value to him too.  To most of us, the boulders, stones, gravel and pebbles in our lives  are irritants that often keep the word of God from growing in our hearts. God values each heart and asks us to be involved in the preparation of even the rockiest soil. So our job as a church, as gardeners in God’s garden of humans is to be like these companies that come in and help to remove the stones.  Under the persistent love of God (sometimes offered through us), like a drop of water wears away a stone on which it drops constantly, the stone will wear away. Perhaps we can also bring in some topsoil, or share some from our own depth of soil. Sometimes the seed will grow even in this rocky soil, but it sprouts very quickly, and withers just as quickly.  Let’s prepare the soil so that the growth will put down deep roots and grow strong.

*The church is an organized religion with a political agenda

*The church is judgmental and negative

*The church is homophobic

*The church arrogantly claims all other religions are wrong

*The church is full of fundamentalists who take the whole Bible literally

            If you look out at our front lawn you will see some places that, even after a lawn contractor came and seeded the lawn, remain bare while there is grass sprouting everywhere else.  Now I’m no expert, but it seems to me that the seed just didn’t get to these spots.  We live in a post-Christian culture today in which there are some people who have  never been spoken to by someone who loves God and believes that Jesus speaks to us the Words of Life itself.  These people are also a part of our front lawn and we need to also establish a relationship with that soil.